Global Voices » Kevin Rothrock

Vladimir Putin: Lord of the (Super Bowl) Rings

Kevin Rothrock — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 03:25:43 +0000

Did Vladimir Putin steal New England Patriots’ owner Robert Kraft's Super Bowl ring when they met in 2005? Many Russian bloggers are asking that very question, after Kraft claimed in a June 14, 2013, New York Post interview that he had in fact not given the ring as a gift. Kraft's announcement (which the Patriots’ spokesperson later called a joke) contradicts his own public statement from 2005, immediately following his meeting with Putin, when he said he'd gifted the $25,000 ring to Russia's president “as a symbol” of “respect and admiration.” (Even then in 2005, however, there were media reports [ru] that Kraft had not intended to give Putin the ring.)

Hamburglar Putin, with the Stanley Cup and Super Bowl ring. This image was created by Kevin Rothrock, using “Halloween's Lost Camera 06″ by Andy Pixel, 31 October 2009, CC 2.0.

Whatever Kraft's true intentions eight years ago, Putin's Press Secretary, Dmitri Peskov, found himself faced yesterday, June 16, with awkward questions about whether or not Putin indeed robbed an American billionaire football-team-owner of his championship ring. Peskov's response [ru] would attract a wave of RuNet mockery:

Если этот джентльмен испытывает действительно такую мучительную боль от утраты произошедшего, кажется, в 2005 году, в связи с актом доверия, то президент будет готов отправить ему какое-нибудь другое кольцо, которое сможет купить за свои деньги.

If this gentleman [Kraft] is experiencing such agony from this loss that apparently occurred in 2005, then the President is prepared as an act of good faith to send him back some other kind of ring, that he will be able to buy with his own money.

Andrei Illarionov, one of Putin's former economic advisors and currently a senior fellow at the conservative Washington think tank, the Cato Institute, dissected Peskov's comments on his blog [ru], arguing that they incriminate Putin in the theft of the ring. Illarionov's logic runs: if the Super Bowl ring is currently stored in the Kremlin's official library, then it is legally regarded as a gift to Russia's head of state, and thus is government property. If Peskov is proposing to refund Kraft the value of the ring, that money should therefore be paid out of the federal budget. That Peskov conveyed Putin's private ability to purchase a replacement ring, however, suggests that the artifact in reality has reverted to Putin's private property. Illarionov concludes his post with the following list of suspicions:

Почему же Песков вынужден говорить о покупке нового кольца?
Потому ли, что оригинальный перстень невозможно вернуть?
А почему невозможно?
Потому что перстня с бриллиантами в президентской библиотеке больше нет?
А был ли он там?
Куда же он делся?
И где этот перстень сейчас?
И почему нельзя просто вернуть злополучный перстень его хозяину?

But why did Peskov need to talk about buying a new ring?
Because the original ring is impossible to return?
But why is that impossible?
Because the diamond-studded ring is no longer in the Presidential Library?
Was it ever there?
Where did it disappear to?
And where is this ring now?
And why is it impossible just to return this unfortunate ring to its owner?

In another amusing commentary [ru] on this story, the blog “Cult Magazine” tried to convey to Russians the significance of Kraft's Super Bowl ring, bearing in mind that the NFL is largely a foreign game to non-Americans. Hockey, on the other hand, enjoys wide popularity in Russia, and the NHL's championship trophy, the Stanley Cup, is for most Russians a more familiar award. While the better parallel to the Stanley Cup in NFL football is the Vince Lombardi Trophy (also a large, difficult-to-steal object), Cult Magazine used the inaccurate comparison to maximum comedic effect:

Еще раз – это награда Национальной Футбольной Лиги, которая вручается победителям Чемпионата Мира по американскому футболу, и награда очень престижная. Представьте, человек решил похвастаться кубком Стенли, а президент вдруг решил, что это подарок и ушёл с ним.

Once again, this is the award in the National Football League given to the winners of the World Championship in American football, and the award is very prestigious. Imagine if someone decided to brag about winning the Stanley Cup, and the President suddenly decided that it was a present for him, and he took off with it.

While this story will undoubtedly fade from the headlines in a matter of weeks (if not days), the incident marks what seems to be one of countless recent episodes in the Kremlin's ailing public image worldwide.

Orphaned in US, SOPA Finds Home in Russia

Kevin Rothrock — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:46:31 +0000

America’s controversial Stop Online Piracy Act is back—and it’s poised to become law in a matter of weeks. SOPA, however, isn’t coming to the United States, where a wide coalition of Internet companies, human rights organizations, and concerned citizens defeated the legislation with a massive protest campaign in January 2012. A law that creates similarly harsh penalties for online copyright violations is on the cusp of finding a home in Russia, where it is called “Bill № 292521-6 [ru]: Amendments to the Russian Federation’s Laws Protecting Intellectual Property Rights on Information-Telecommunications Networks.” The media, understandably, is just calling it “the Russian SOPA.”

The lower house of Russia’s parliament, the Duma, approved [ru] a first draft of the legislation today, June 14, 2013, with a vote of 257 to 3 (plus one abstention). This move by lawmakers comes despite unanimous opposition from Russia’s Internet companies, which have rushed this week to publish detailed reports on the legislation’s potentially catastrophic damage to the RuNet.

This image was created by Kevin Rothrock using Vladimir Putin's official portrait by the Russian Presidential Press and Information Office, 2006, CC 3.0.

Russian SOPA’s nuts and bolts

Indeed, Russia’s SOPA-clone contains a number of worrying clauses. The law’s regime for notifying Internet service providers of copyright abuses, for instance, is laughably inadequate. Copyright holders do not need to provide ISPs with the specific location of an infringement (not even a URL address), forcing Internet companies to conduct constant monitoring for possible misuses of (potentially) copyrighted materials.

The law also revises the conditions of limited liability, exposing ISPs and other Internet intermediaries to legal responsibility in situations where they exercise no control over the content in question. Russian search engine Yandex warns [ru]:

[…] позволяет прийти к абсурдному выводу о том, что, получив уведомление правообладателя о потенциальном нарушении, имеющем место при передаче материала, провайдер, осуществляющий передачу, будет обязан каким-то образом прекратить такую передачу в отношении конкретного материала, что технически невозможно.

[The law] allows us to come to the absurd conclusion that, having been notified by the copyright holder of a potential violation occurring in the transmission of materials, the ISP, which performs the transmission, will be required somehow to stop the transfer of some specific material, which is technically impossible.

The Russian Association for Electronic Communications (RAEC), which participated in the Culture Ministry’s working group [ru] on the anti-piracy legislation, has also criticized [ru] the law’s lack of consideration for possible fair use of copyrighted materials. Additionally, the RAEC protests, the law creates circumstances wherein ISPs must take provisional measures before copyright holders have filed a formal claim with the courts. Many opponents of the Russian SOPA cite this aspect of the law as an example of extrajudicial censorship. The reality of the law’s provisions is more complicated.

According to the legislation, the Moscow City Court would serve as the court of first instance in all civil cases involving online copyright infringement. Copyright holders first appeal to the court with a complaint that their property is being misused online, attaching (1) proof that they own the materials in question, and (2) proof that someone else is using them. (The court is supposed to take no action, without these attachments.) The court then determines a deadline, not to exceed fifteen days, by which the plaintiff must file a formal statement of claim, which actually launches the legal suit.

In the two weeks between the initial appeal and the option to file a suit, however, the law empowers the Moscow Court to force ISPs to take “interim measures” to remove the content in question, or risk having their entire IP address blocked, if they fail to comply within three days. If the plaintiff fails to file suit after fifteen days, the court dismisses the case and lifts the order for interim measures.

The RAEC claims that there is nothing in the legislation to prevent copyright holders from appealing to the Moscow Court every two weeks, without ever filing a formal suit. In other words, determined plaintiffs could keep in force what are supposed to be interim measures, by using the law as a rotating door. The RAEC explains in its report [ru] on the legislation:

Правообладатель имеет возможность не подавать иск, а каждые 15 дней обращаться за применением новых предварительных обеспечительных мер, и никакой ответственности за подобную практику не установлено.

The copyright holder has the opportunity not to sue, but every fifteen days [it can] appeal for the application of new interim measures, and [the law] establishes no responsibility for such behavior.

However, there is a provision in the law that allows ISPs to sue for losses incurred when executing the interim measures, if the plaintiff fails to file a formal suit within the fifteen-day period, or if an arbitration court later rejects the copyright holder’s claim. The current legislation [ru] reads:

Организация или гражданин, права и (или) законные интересы которых нарушены обеспечением имущественных интересов до предъявления иска, вправе требовать по своему выбору от заявителя возмещения убытков […], если заявителем в установленный судом срок не было подано исковое заявление по требованию […], или если вступившим в законную силу судебным актом арбитражного суда в иске отказано.

The organization or citizen, whose rights and (or) lawful interests are violated by ensuring the [plaintiff’s] property interests before the filing of a claim, has the right to demand their choice of indemnity for losses suffered […], if the plaintiff did not file a claim in the required time period […], or if a valid court decision by an arbitration court rejected [the plaintiff’s] claim.

Finally, the RAEC complains that the law creates a jurisdiction overlap with existing arbitration procedure code, and generates an inconvenient and inefficient legal bottleneck by forcing all parties, regardless of their location, to deal with a Moscow court.

Stakeholders propose changes

The new anti-piracy law also calls for blocking entire IP addresses, in the event of noncompliance with court-ordered interim measures. The push for blacklisting entire IPs is surprising, given the growing consensus that this method is more likely to damage legitimate websites than the Web’s copyright infringers, who can easily circumvent an IP blacklist by changing hosts, adopting dynamic IP addresses, and so on. While Internet service providers and industry experts have long criticized IP blocking (which came packaged in Russia’s legislation last year to blacklist online materials harmful to children), even Roskomnadzor—the government body responsible for administering that blacklist—recently acknowledged the inefficiency of IP blocking in a post [ru] on its new public outreach website, “WeCanTrust.net.”

The Duma’s Committee on Culture has also proposed a series of controversial amendments that could appear in the next iteration of the legislation. The Committee’s suggestions include an expansion of the law’s applicability to search engines; the creation of a new blacklist for all websites containing illegal materials; and applying the law not just to audiovisual content, but also to “books, articles, photographs, and other copyrighted objects.”

Yesterday, on June 13, 2013, Yandex sent [ru] the Duma its official list [ru] of comments and suggestions for revising the anti-piracy law, as the bill heads back to committee for more amendments, ahead of its second and third readings on the parliament floor, which could take place as early as next week [ru]. In a blog post [ru] that also sharply criticized the new legislation, Google Russia’s Director of Government Relations, Marina Zhunich, announced that Google, too, has shared with the Duma its recommendations for eliminating the most radical aspects of the draft legislation.

Both Google and Yandex are calling for amendments that would render the Russian SOPA more similar to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, another American law, passed in 1998 by a unanimous vote in the United States Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. Unlike the anti-piracy law that Russian legislators are now considering, the DMCA exempts from liability Internet service providers and other intermediaries under a regime in which copyright holders directly notify ISPs of infringement claims, without the application of automatic censorship or state-administered blacklists.

PRISM Infects Russia with Cyberwar Scare

Kevin Rothrock — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 17:38:51 +0000

Brace yourself. The cyberwar is coming.

Since last week, when the world learned about PRISM, a vast and secret American electronic surveillance program, Russian state officials have expressed renewed concerns about foreign social networks posing a national security threat. One day after news of the U.S. program broke, on June 7, 2013, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin told [ru] reporters that websites like Facebook and Twitter are elements of a larger American campaign against Russia:

Через них идет мощнейшая манипуляция общественным мнением, ведь всякие “лайки” и прочие кнопки, которые вы там нажимаете, моментально вводят вас в определенные группы, которые потом анализируются, систематизируются. […] Тем самым увеличивается количество тех людей, которые начинают получать специальную контентную информацию, подрывающую авторитет власти и ценности государства. […]

Through them [American social networks], there’s a powerful, ongoing manipulation of public opinion—indeed, every “like” and every click instantly lands you in a certain group, which is then analyzed and classified. […] In doing so, rising is the number of people, who start receiving special content that undermines the authority and value of the state. […]

Dmitry Rogozin, as Russian Ambassador to NATO and Special Envoy on missile defense, 29 June 2011, photo by Security & Defence Agenda, CC 2.0.

Just yesterday, June 11, in a letter [ru] to Rogozin and other security figures, Duma deputy Ilya Kostunov called for tighter regulations on state officials’ Internet activity, based on the worry that Russian bureaucrats commonly discuss or upload government secrets in communications hosted on American websites (namely, Google’s email service, Gmail). In an exchange [ru] on Twitter, Kostunov discussed the possible implementation of his proposed regulations, running into some disagreement about the need for additional legislation and the proper criminal classification of uploading secret materials to a foreign Web host.

Communications expert Petr Pervushkin argued [ru] that a closed virtual network for private communications has already existed in the Russian government for seven years, though another Twitter user put that figure [ru] closer to four years. Just Russia party functionary Aleksandr Luchin noted that rules are already in place to forbid discussing state secrets on Internet sites like Google and Facebook, but acknowledged [ru] that regulations fail to set penalties. Luchin proposed tying such infractions to the criminal codes against disclosing state secrets (though he didn't specify [ru] if he had in mind Article 283 or 284, which threaten maximum imprisonment up to four and three years, respectively), whereas Kostunov has advocated equating such behavior with treason (article 275), which carries a prison sentence up to twenty years. (This push for classifying the offense under treason prompted qz.com reporter Leo Mirani to declare, perhaps hyperbolically, that Russia is “stepping up its war on social networks.”)

Meanwhile, blogger and RuNet guru Anton Nosik claims [ru] that station management refused to air his recent appearance on OTR, Russia’s all-new public broadcasting television channel, when during the recording he criticized Rogozin’s comments about the supposed American cyberwar against Russia. Nosik took part in an episode of the show “The Social Network,” answering a series of RuNet-related questions that began with one about Rogozin's remarks. After four days of silence following his visit to the studio, Nosik took to LiveJournal for a second time to discuss [ru] the curious absence from OTR's official website [ru] of his appearance:

Как я и предполагал, моё интервью […] не попал ни в их загадочный эфир, ни даже на сайт. Потому что, как выясняется, для этого супернезависимого телеканала неприкасаемыми фигурами являются не только Путин и Собянин, но и вице-премьер Рогозин. Самое время Общественному телевидению открывать программы про кошечек, собачек и кулинарию.

As I expected, my interview […] has appeared nowhere in [the station’s] mysterious feed, or even on the website. Because, it turns out, for this super-independent TV channel, the untouchable figures aren’t limited to Putin and Sobyanin, but even include Deputy Prime Minister Rogozin. OTR might as well launch shows about kitties, doggies, and cooking.

Nosik doesn’t often respond to the hundreds of reader comments that follow his blog posts, but one audience member did provoke a reaction, when he accused [ru] Nosik of adopting an approach “inappropriate to television,” arguing that he attacked Rogozin too early in the broadcast, without “nuance” or first establishing the context of his criticism. Nosik wrote back [ru] to say that he’s never encountered such problems in the hundreds of interviews he’s granted to other TV channels over the past twenty years.

While it’s true that OTR has yet to air or even post to its website Nosik’s segment, his thirteen-minute interview is accessible on OTR’s official YouTube channel (see above). The station’s troubles with Nosik come the same week as another censorship scandal [ru] surrounding a different unaired episode of “The Social Network,” wherein hosts Vladislav Sorokin and Ekaterina Voronina poked fun at Vladimir Putin’s recent divorce, sharing mashable.com’s faux dating profile for Russia’s now-single head-of-state. When the station declined to telecast the episode “for technical reasons” [ru], Sorokin and Voronina announced on Facebook [ru] that they would resign from the show at the end of the month.

The thumbnail image used in this post is by Kevin Rothrock, created using Memegenerator.net. Visit Memegenerator.net to caption your own memes.

Pavel Durov, Founder of Russia's #1 Social Network, Is Not Going to Prison (For Now)

Kevin Rothrock — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 02:27:09 +0000

It looks like Pavel Durov can finally return to Russia without a prison sentence threatening from overhead. That, for the moment anyway, seems to be true, now that St. Petersburg detectives have closed their inquiry [ru] into Durov's alleged involvement in an April 5, 2013, traffic accident that left one police officer with minor injuries. Despite finally establishing that it was indeed Durov driving the car, investigators today announced that they have been unable to find evidence that he acted with malicious intent. Accordingly, they have reduced [ru] the criminal charges to a misdemeanor, and sent the case to a local police branch for a decision about the appropriate penalty.

Pavel Durov, screenshot from YouTube clip, 20 February 2013.

Durov—”Russia's own Zuckerberg” and creator of the country's most popular online social network, Vkontakte—has been living outside Russia since the car incident, presumably to avoid investigators’ summons to come in for questioning. Strangely (in light of today's news), police only two days ago extended by a full month [ru] their investigation into the hit-and-run case, which was due to expire for lack of charges. Though they only considered Durov a witness before today, police have now gone ahead and elevated his status to perpetrator, albeit with the crucial diminution of the crime from “using force against a state representative” to ”disobeying an officer of the law.”

What prompted this about-face in investigators’ behavior? Did someone high in the government intervene to “call off the dogs”? Or has Durov been dealing on the side, and could this end to his criminal case mean that he's struck a compromise with Kremlin authorities, who lately have demonstrated growing eagerness [ru] to exercise control over Vkontakte? Perhaps Moscow is trying to undo political damage inflicted on Russia's international reputation, following prominent economist Sergey Guriev's recent high-profile emigration to France?

Durov and his spokespeople, for their part, have maintained his non-involvement in the April 5 traffic incident. In late April, Dozhd Television network ran a story that he had permanently emigrated to the United States, to start a new social network, in response to United Capital Partners’ purchase of 48% of Vkontakte. Durov denied the rumor [ru] and insisted that he had not expatriated.

With the threat of prison removed, it now falls to Durov to return and prove that he has not left Russia for good. If he does come back, though, who's to say he won't again become a target?

The Moscow Mayoral Election Will Test Russia's Internet Culture

Kevin Rothrock — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 17:16:56 +0000

When Moscow’s civil society exploded after national elections 18 months ago, pouring tens of thousands of protesters into the streets and electrifying a nascent class of Internet-connected “creatives,” it seemed to the world that the Putin regime was for the first time faltering. Demonstrators gathered throughout the country, but only Moscow proved capable of sustaining a truly mass movement. As the weeks passed, Russians shifted their attention to the March 2012 presidential election, which Vladimir Putin won handily, sapping the protest movement of its momentum. In the months since then, the much-hailed Snow Revolution has dissipated, absent a catalyst like the December 2011 parliamentary elections.

Enter Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin and this week’s surprising announcement [ru] that he is calling for snap elections (scheduled for September 8, 2013), transforming the coming summer into a battle over who will lead the city for the next five years. In the 2011-2012 round of protests, Moscow’s urban malcontents were always under pressure to exaggerate the national appeal of their cause. For instance, when Moscow’s oppositionist stars flocked to Astrakhan in April 2012 to support a rogue politician’s hunger strike, it was a transparent attempt to show that Moscow wasn’t alone in the fight against the Putin regime.

It serves to reason that there will be no need for such theatrics in Moscow’s coming mayoral election, where such distractions as demonstrations of artificial solidarity are unnecessary.

Vladimir Milov, discussing migration policy, 7 February 2013, clip from YouTube.

Politician Vladimir Milov, however, disagrees that Sobyanin has freed Moscow from diversion. Writing in his LiveJournal blog yesterday, June 4, 2013, Milov argued precisely the opposite [ru], insisting that the opposition should stick to its preexisting plan and focus itself on winning seats next year in the Moscow City Council:

Вывод – надо бороться за главную цель, большинство в Мосгордуме, и ни в коем случае не отвлекать ограниченные ресурсы на мэрскую кампанию, заведомо проигрышную. Не все матчи можно выиграть – если мэром останется Собянин, по факту ничего не изменится. Зато если мы отвлечем ресурсы на мэрскую кампанию, перебросив их с выборов в МГД, то там победить будет шансов уже меньше.

[My] conclusion is that we need to pursue the main goal—a majority in the Moscow City Council, and in no way should we divert our limited resources to a mayoral campaign that we’re certain to lose. You can’t win ‘em all, and nothing in fact changes if Sobyanin remains mayor. But if we divert to a mayoral campaign the resources for the city council elections, then our chances of winning seats in the latter only diminish.

For this advice, eDemocracy guru and member of Alexey Navalny’s inner circle, Leonid Volkov, branded [ru] Milov a “Kremlin stooge” (a “murzilka”), snapping that Milov’s political career is likely Kremlin-funded.

Navalny, of course, is the younger generation’s great hope in this race, and he has indicated [ru] his interest in participating, though he’s yet to make it entirely clear if that means he will seek candidacy himself or campaign on behalf of others. (Indeed, in what perhaps provoked Volkov’s ire on Twitter, Milov mocked Navalny’s evasiveness, alluding to its similarities with Putin’s infamous mystique.) Navalny, a blogger, an anti-corruption activist, and a public figure who—according to a recent national poll [ru]—is known to over 40% of the country, would certainly be the most exciting potential candidate to face Sobyanin. If he were to run, his campaign would test the common speculation that Russian mass culture is revolutionized by the demise of television’s monopoly on information (and the concurrent rise of the Internet, where Navalny is a superstar).

The December 2011 parliamentary elections were another experiment in measuring the Internet’s influence, as Navalny used blogs and social networks to spearhead a campaign against the nation’s dominant political party, United Russia. The Web’s reach outside Moscow, however, is debatable. According to a study [ru] conducted last autumn by the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), while Web access has been expanding fastest in Russia’s regions, Internet penetration in Moscow and St. Petersburg (at about 70%) is still 20% higher than the national average.

Alexey Navalny attends opposition demonstration in Moscow, 26 February 2012, photo by Evgeniy Isaev, CC 2.0.

Even where the Internet reaches Russians outside the capital, the peculiarities of Muscovites’ Western-leaning product preferences (i.e., Facebook and Twitter, instead of Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki) enfeeble the efforts of men like Navalny, unintentionally but thoroughly shrinking their audiences.

In the September mayoral election, none of these obstacles will be present. Moscow’s Internet culture—an eccentricity nationally—can finally perform in the mainstream, as bloggers and netizens pound at their keyboards for the next three months, weighing in, lashing out, and exerting whatever influence they indeed possess.

That said, much depends on whether or not the city will agree to register Navalny as a candidate, if he indeed decides to run. Navalny is currently on trial for embezzlement charges that, if he is convicted, would deprive him of the legal right to stand for elected office. Additionally, the legislation [ru] that will bring Moscow its first elected mayor in ten years is the same document that puts in place significant barriers to candidacy. Unless Navalny can find a registered political party to nominate him, he will have to collect almost 120,000 signatures from the city’s residents. All candidates must also obtain the support of 6% of Moscow’s municipal deputies [ru], who can only endorse a single candidate. (See Article 37, Point 15.5, of Moscow’s city electoral code [ru].)

Leftist activist Sergey Udaltsov, who announced today [ru] on his Ekho Moskvy blog that he, too, intends to run for Sobyanin’s seat, estimates there are only about 90 opposition-leaning deputies from whom one might expect mayoral endorsements. Add to these troubles the fact that more regime-friendly “oppositionists” like Mikhail Prokhorov [ru], Alena Popova [ru], and others could join the contest, and Navalny’s chances do look slim indeed.

If Navalny tries and fails to register for the race, the remaining question will be what reaction it prompts from Moscow’s “urban malcontents.” Will they resort to a despondent boycott, as émigré photoblogger Rustem Adagamov is already advocating [ru], or will Russia’s capital city again rise up, buoyed by the liberating, mobilizing might of the Internet?

All Hail Russia's Heroic Cop-Killers?

Kevin Rothrock — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 20:27:32 +0000

A group of unknown assailants is killing police officers in Russia’s Rostov region. In the last seven months, authorities have linked the same stolen weapons to the slayings of five officers [ru] (two active, three retired), in attacks that resemble a wave of cop-killings [ru] that swept Rostov in 2008 and 2009 and claimed twelve lives. Authorities report that the murderers employ guerilla tactics, often laying traps for their victims and firing from cover. The criminals’ pattern—targeting cops, attacking by surprise, and stealing their weapons—has led many to compare them to the infamous Primorsky Partisans, a self-declared “guerilla group” of six men who terrorized the police of Russia’s Far East in early 2010.

Still from the Primorsky Partisans’ public appeal, published to YouTube in October 2010, after their capture, hosted on nnm.ru/blogs.

While the Primorsky Partisans captivated Russia with overt talk of popular armed resistance against police occupation (famously conveyed in a public appeal [ru] posted to YouTube in October 2010), Rostov’s cop-killers (whose more recent activity has been in the town of Novocherkassk) remain anonymous, and have yet to attract international, let alone national, attention. Indeed, it’s possible that the five killings since last year are the work of an entirely different group than the one responsible for murdering a slew of Rostov police and their families years ago. After all, in that earlier killing spree, the assailants stabbed to death children as young as eleven and seven, and took the lives of several women. The five active and retired police officers to die in Novocherkassk since last September, on the other hand, have all been adult men.

When it comes to shocking the public with death tolls, however, seventeen is a better number than five, and the added intrigue of “reawakened cop-killers” could soon make Rostov’s criminals into national media stars. If the chatter on Russia’s most popular social network, Vkontakte, is any indication, clouds may already be gathering for a coming news storm.

In VK’s popular news-discussion group [ru], “Free News,” LiveJournal user vsevidyacheeoko’s post [ru] about Novocherkassk’s police murders drew over 400 comments, almost 300 shares, and over 650 “likes.” VK users debated the killers’ similarities to the Primorsky Partisans, and exchanged long, vitriolic remarks about the morality (or lack thereof) of fighting back violently against (presumed to be corrupt) police.

Vsevidyacheeoko, who wrote in his post that a “civil war” has begun against an “occupying regime,” prompted the following response [ru] from Elvira Pushchugina:

А почему гражданская война тогда, если из статьи понятно, что речь об организованной преступности?

And why [call it] a civil war then, if from the article it’s clear that we’re talking about organized crime?

Pushchugina’s refusal to see Novocherkassk’s assailants as anything but gangsters annoyed several of the community’s members, who in turn asked if she felt the same way about the Primorsky Partisans. When Pushchugina indicated that she did not know who they were, her critics released the proverbial hounds. Vitaly Kulikov assumed that her ignorance was due to a reliance on television for information, writing [ru]:

жесть – не знать приморских партизан- видимо зомбоящик делает свое дело

awesome — not [even] knowing [about] the Primorsky Partisans — clearly the boob tube is doing its job

Sergey Starovoitov “encouraged” her to learn more, commenting [ru]:

Гугл в помощь. И вообще, те кто служат этой власти – предатели народных интересов.

Google to the rescue! Generally speaking, those who serve this power structure are traitors to the people’s interests.

Undeterred, Pushchugina retorted [ru] that Kulikov and Starovoitov might warm to law enforcement, were they ever to find themselves threatened by outlaws:

[…] ну-ну. Посмотрим, куда ты побежишь, если тебя случайно ограбят или побьют.

Now, now! Let’s see where you run, if you’re randomly robbed or beaten.

Ironically, community members took this comment as an invitation to share personal stories about police brutality. VK user Pit Klimov wrote [ru]:

Эльвира, последний раз меня били и грабили менты. Бежать действительно было некуда! :-)

Elvira, the last time I was beat up and robbed, it was by cops. There really was nowhere to run! :-)

Moscow-based 59-year-old Marina Zolotova wrote [ru] that police once nearly beat to death her son. Like Starovoitov, she endorsed [ru] an open hunting season on police, rejecting the characterization of Novocherkassk’s assailants as criminals:

[…] Уверена, что это не стихийная или случайная акция. Скорее всего эти полицаи – и есть преступники. Те кто действуют против своего народа не заслуживают ни жалости ни сострадания. Собакам – собачья смерть !

[…] I’m sure that these acts are neither spontaneous nor random. It’s more likely that these policemen are the criminals. Those who act against their own people deserve neither pity nor sympathy. A dog’s death for dogs!

Also demonstrating that passions online run hot not just among the youth, 50-year-old VK user Alexey Khazov declared [ru] his readiness to take up arms against enemies of the people:

Не дай бог если бы началась гражданская война,я уж точно не был бы на стороне режима.Оружие в руках держать умею

God forbid, if civil war were to break out, I would certainly not be on the regime’s side. I know how to handle a weapon.

Russians’ enthusiasm for cop-killers is nothing new. In mid-2010, when the Primorsky Partisans were at the height of their celebrity, the liberal radio station Ekho Moskvy polled [ru] its listeners, asking whether they would offer the group assistance, if asked for help. Only a quarter of the audience said it would refuse to give aid. In a more scientific poll, the Levada Center later determined [ru] that only 37% of Russians thought the Partisans were criminals, and the nation was narrowly split 34:37, when asked who presented the greater public danger: cops or cop-killers.

Curiously, the VK group’s discussion about the “Novocherkassk Partisans” flows on the largely unspoken assumption that, of course, the officers killed in the attacks were members of a corrupt institution. Perhaps justifying that premise, news broke [ru] today, June 3, 2013, that internal investigators have charged 15 police officers in Rostov with falsifying case records to exaggerate their department’s efficiency. This news comes roughly a week after investigators accused another Rostov police division [ru] of similar corruption.

The “Brave” Democrats of Russia's Growing Civil Society

Kevin Rothrock — Wed, 29 May 2013 04:21:23 +0000

As Vladimir Putin “turns the screws” on Russian public life in his third presidential term, Russian civil society is increasingly a repository for the ideologists and movers-and-shakers of an earlier age of Kremlin statecraft. Weeks ago, after the ouster of Vladislav Surkov (Moscow’s “grey cardinal”), observers from all over the globe proclaimed the end of an era in Russian politics. Last week, on May 22, 2013, when Surkov-ally Alexey Chesnakov quit United Russia and publicly criticized the party, few in the English-speaking world noticed, but the event could just as easily represent an important moment for Russian society.

Amidst a growing crackdown on foreign-funded NGOs and show trials either underway or looming against leaders of the protest movement, it’s easy to assume that Russian civil society is little more than a patchwork of persecuted activists and scholars. In fact, changes in the Kremlin have actually furnished the country’s public sphere with a fresh supply of former apparatchiki, whose fall from grace has pressured them out of formal politics, into the nebula of public policy research and advocacy. (Indeed, Mikhail Rostovsky has mocked [ru] this very phenomenon of Kremlin functionaries transforming into “brave democrats,” upon losing favor.)

When your outside's in, and your downside's up

Alexey Chesnakov at a meeting between PM Vladimir Putin and political scientists, 6 February 2012, photo by Government.ru, public domain.

Chesnakov is a case in point. Throughout Putin’s first two terms as president, he led the Administration’s information-analysis division, and later helped manage the Kremlin’s internal policy. Since 2008, Chesnakov has been a member of Russia’s Civic Chamber, held different leadership positions at the Center for Current Politics (TsPK), and served as a deputy secretary in United Russia’s General Council. (He also had a brief stint as a Kasimov city council member, in a failed bid [ru] for a seat in the national Senate, for which bloggers [ru] thoroughly condemned him.) In other words, Chesnakov has participated in public life on both the inside and outside of government, albeit always with a foot in the door, should he want to return either to public service or party work.

After leaving the party so loudly last week, Chesnakov appears to have shut the door on United Russia. (The metaphor he later used [ru] was “burned bridges.”) In four separate interviews (all on May 22), Chesnakov laid out “stylistic differences” with United Russia, which it turns out involve ostensibly procedural gripes about how the party goes about drafting legislative initiatives. In all the interviews, he stressed the need for a two-party system that would subject United Russia to competition he says is necessary to preserve its vitality.

Some of his other statements, however, lack a general coherence. For instance, Chesnakov argued in comments to Kommersant [ru] and Moskovskii Komsomolets [ru] that the Kremlin’s micromanagement hamstrings United Russia, but he told [ru] Slon.ru that one of the party’s most poorly handled legislative efforts (the ban on U.S. adoptions) was engineered exclusively by United Russia Secretary General Sergey Neverov.

The RuNet Bees Nest

The day that Chesnakov announced his exit from United Russia, LiveJournal users added to the controversy with two separate (albeit dubious) allegations. First, blogger Mikhail Antonov obtained and published [ru] screenshots of Chesnakov’s friends-only Facebook posts from May 22. What caught the public’s attention was a long and flowery description of a culinary experience at a Paris restaurant. While Chesnakov later claimed this post referred to a past visit to France, some of his critics were quick to compare his resignation to Surkov’s foreign trip to the London School of Economics, where Surkov criticized federal investigators, possibly instigating his own ouster. “This is probably some new trend, making political announcements from abroad,” Olga Batalina (Chesnakov’s UR deputy secretary successor) joked [ru] to the media.

In two posts on May 22 and 24, blogger Viktor Levanov explored Chesnakov’s prospects [ru] as an independent political force, postulating that he would need to compensate for his public obscurity by attracting wealthy sponsors. Going a step further, Levanov floated a few admittedly tenuous connections [ru] between Chesnakov and Dmitri Kuznetsov, the general director of SkyJet airlines. After this speculation apparently flooded Levanov with phone calls and written inquiries, he soon published [ru] reader-submitted screenshots of stockholder data on SkyJet and another business called SkyPoint, showing that Chesnakov seemed to own part of the companies. (Chesnakov responded [ru] on May 24, denying an ongoing role in Kuznetsov’s airlines, explaining that Levanov’s figures were over a year old and that he no longer owns SkyJet shares.)

Civil society versus siloviki

Chesnakov’s think tank, TsPK, used to publish on its website weekly memos about Russian domestic politics. Those briefs often created waves [ru] among Russia’s chattering classes, such as an August 2011 memo [ru] speculating that Putin was moving to weaken his chief silovik, Igor Sechin. (All evidence suggests that things turned out otherwise.) The Center’s last weekly memo went live [ru] in early October 2012. Shortly thereafter, the website closed down [ru] for “reconstruction,” where it remains today. On May 22, 2013, Chesnakov told Kommersant that he would welcome his new nonpartisan status by publishing through TsPK a series of political papers about risks facing Russia’s political system over the next year of Putin’s presidency. Earlier today, May 28, he announced [ru] the upcoming release of 12 articles addressing problems facing United Russia. That content, however, will appear in TsPK’s side-project electronic periodical [ru], Topical Commentary.

Laughing at Russia's Eurovision Shooting Spirit

Kevin Rothrock — Tue, 21 May 2013 23:56:11 +0000

In 1945, following a visit by the USSR's Dynamo soccer team, George Orwell wrote that sports are “war minus the shooting.” He also said that “serious” sports have “nothing to do with fair play.” Earlier today, May 21, 2013, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov seemed to echo this spirit, when he commented on his country's fifth place finish in this year's Eurovision Song Contest.

At a joint press conference [ru] with his counterpart from Azerbaijan, Lavrov denounced supposed voting irregularities surrounding Russia's representative, Dina Garipova, whom he believes should have earned another ten points from Azerbaijan's voters. Claiming that the points were “stolen,” Russia's chief diplomat called the anomaly “an outrageous act” and promised Russian retaliation. There is a precedent for such Eurovision reprisals: in 2009, Azerbaijani national security officials responded [ru] to its own lackluster performance by calling in for questioning several citizens who voted “unpatriotically” in the contest. Such uproar has even prompted a statement from this year's Eurovision organizers, who warned that “any form of political pressure on professional juries” would have consequences.

Dina Garipova performs her song, “What If,” in Eurovision's final round, 18 May 2013.

While Eurovision 2013 is over and Russia's contestant has been defeated, Russian Twitter users continue to find entertainment in Lavrov's bellicose comments. Many juxtaposed the federal government's sensitivity about Eurovision voting to its largely indifferent attitude about election violations in Russia's own, real elections.

Mocking Russia's recently-instituted webcam-monitoring project for polling stations, Oleg Kozyrev tweeted:

В следующем году с целью обеспечения прозрачности голосования на Евровидении Владимир Путин установит в домах всех европейцев веб-камеры

Next year, in order to ensure Eurovision's voting transparency, Putin will place webcams in the homes of every European.

Noting Belorussian President Alexander Lukashenko's similar complaints about Eurovision, activist Ilya Yashin wrote:

ЕС заявлял о фальсификациях на выборах в России и Беларуси. Лавров и Лукашенко заявили о фальсификации на Евровидении. Шах и мат, европейцы.

The European Union declared voting falsifications in Russia and Belarus. Lavrov and Lukashenko declared falsifications in Eurovision. Checkmate, Europeans.

Twitter user VRebyata wrote sarcastically:

В ходе Евровидения оказалось, что Российские власти могут проявлять чрезвычайную принципиальность в подведении итогов голосования

In this year's Eurovision, it turned out that the Russian authorities can indeed display special commitment to vote tabulation.

Oppositionist and anti-corruption blogger Alexey Navalny spun Lavrov's comments into an attack on Russia's leading political party, tweeting facetiously:

Глава МИД Лавров заявил, что в ответ на неправильный подсчет голосов на ‘Евровидении', ‘ЕдРо’ получит дополнительные 15% голосов на выборах

Foreign Affairs Head Lavrov has announced that, in response to the incorrect counting of votes for Eurovision, United Russia will receive an extra 15% of the votes in [future] elections.

Billionaire and Novaya Gazeta newspaper co-owner Alexander Lebedev teased Lavrov with feigned congratulations:

Молодец Лавров по случаю Евровидения!Это и есть внешняя политика

Well done, Lavrov, on [dealing with] Eurovision! Now that's what I call foreign policy

Twitter user Stanislav Burdelyov joked that Vladimir Putin's longtime domination of Russian elections affected voters’ behavior, writing:

Дина Гарипова не выиграла Евровидение потому, что россияне по привычке проголосовали за Путина.

Dina Garipova didn't win Eurovision because Russians [everywhere] are used to voting [only] for Putin.

Ridiculing Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev's dwindling political clout, Andrey Girich tweeted:

Надо было Медведева на Евровидение отправить

They should have sent Medvedev to Eurovision [instead of Garipova]

Sasha Grey in Vladivostok, Russia, 15 May 2013, screen capture from YouTube.

Twitter user Bernard Galt tied Lavrov's hostile remarks to Russia's two other ongoing entertainment-news imbroglios: a nationwide road-trip by former porn star Sasha Grey, and Gérard Depardieu's latest police-motorcaded visit [ru] to Chechnya. Galt wrote:

Депардье ездит с мигалкой. Саша Грей читает лекции в Екатеринбурге. Лавров возмущается, что на Евровидении украли голоса. Упоротая Россия

Depardieu drives around with a siren. Sasha Grey is giving lectures in Ekaterinburg. Lavrov is is outraged that they stole our votes on Eurovision. This country is stoned.

With over 300 retweets, the best-loved Eurovision-related quip belongs to a Twitter account called Fake_MIDRF (The Fake Foreign Affairs Ministry of the Russian Federation). That anonymous satirist mocked the country's past attempts to retaliate against perceived slights by foreigners, alluding to Russia's ban on U.S. adoptions (known as the “Dima Yakovlev law” inside Russia):

В ответ на кражу голосов на “Евровидении” у России будет принят закон Дины Гариповой о запрете концертов иностранных граждан в РФ.

In response to the theft of our votes at Eurovision, Russia will enact the Dina Garipova law, banning music concerts by foreign citizens in the Russian Federation.

Russian Sociology Under Assault

Kevin Rothrock — Mon, 20 May 2013 22:30:01 +0000

Science isn’t safe in Russia today. That, anyway, was Lev Gudkov’s message this morning in a public statement published [ru] to the website of the Levada Center, one of Russia’s oldest and best-respected sociological research organizations. The institute is also home to scholars with attitudes widely critical of the Putin regime. Gudkov, who leads the Center, announced that prosecutors in Moscow contacted him five days ago, on May 15, to issue an official warning that his outfit is operating in violation of a recently minted federal law requiring politically-active NGOs receiving funds from abroad to register with the government as foreign agents.

Gudkov posted to slideshare.net scans [ru] of the Moscow prosecutors’ official warning, as well as his own public appeal in defense of the Levada Center. In that latter text, Gudkov announced that the application of the “foreign agents” law to the Center increases the odds that it will have to discontinue its work in the near future. In the statement, he insists that foreign funding comprises at maximum just 3% of Levada’s income, and argues that the organization's scientific work does not amount to political meddling.

Russian sociologist Lev Gudkov, 26 January 2008, photo by Andrei Romanenko, CC 3.0.

Specifically, the state accuses the Levada Center of conducting political work between 2009 and 2012 in exchange for donations from a handful of prominent Western institutions, including $150 thousand from the MacArthur Foundation, $290 thousand from the Ford Foundation, and $337 thousand from the OSI Assistance Foundation. (Disclosure to readers: RuNet Echo is currently funded by the Open Society Institute.) Additionally, Levada fulfilled several market research projects between 2010 and 2013 for foreign organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy (for $40 thousand) and the University of Massachusetts (for $8 thousand).

Gudkov concludes gloomily:

Следуя логике Предостережения прокуратуры, мы должны были бы прекратить выпуск нашего журнала и закрыть сайт Левада-центра, перестать публиковать, открыто комментировать и анализировать результаты наших опросов в среде специалистов и в публичном пространстве – в СМИ, на семинарах и конференциях, на что согласиться мы не можем.

Following the logic of the prosecutors’ warning, we would have to stop publishing our journal and close the Levada Center’s website, stop publishing, [stop] publicly commenting and analyzing the results of our surveys in both the professional sphere and the public space—in the media, in seminars, and at conferences. We cannot agree to this.

On the Levada Center’s Facebook page [ru], the organization has called on netizens [ru] to disseminate Gudkov’s statement, which refutes the claim that sociological work amounts to political activity. At the time of writing this article, the Center’s Facebook post has attracted 158 “likes” and 1,159 “shares.” Many prominent sociologists have also weighed in [ru], arguing against conflating sociological study and political activism. In a Facebook post [ru] that has 79 “shares” of its own, sociologist Vladimir Magun alluded to Russia’s history of Soviet crackdowns on the autonomy and integrity of science:

Какими бы словами и легалистскими аргументами эта постыдная кампания ни прикрывалась, речь идет о войне против современной науки, и ее организаторы и вдохновители должны ясно осознавать, что их имена навсегда войдут в позорный список безграмотных душителей мысли – таких, как Лысенко, Жданов или Трапезников.

Whatever words and legalistic arguments this shameful campaign is hiding behind, this is a case of war against modern science, and its organizers and masterminds should clearly realize that their names will forever be on the shameful list of crude stranglers of free thought—home to men like Lysenko, Zhdanov, or Trapeznikov.

Political analyst and former Kremlin-insider Gleb Pavlovsky wrote [ru] on Facebook to ask the heads of Russia’s other two major sociological institutes, FOM and VTsIOM, what they thought of Levada’s legal troubles. The latter’s chief, Valery Fedorov, responded [ru] an hour later to report that VTsIOM, too, has received such warnings from state prosecutors.

On Twitter, Russian Internet users competed for wittiest remark about the prosecutors’ warning to Levada. With 132 retweets, activist Ilya Yashin appears to be in the lead, having written:

ВЦИОМ и “Левада” зафиксировали снижение рейтингов Путина и ЕР. Прокуратура зафиксировала снижение шансов ВЦИОМ и “Левады” на существование.

VTsIOM and “Levada” have established a decline in the ratings of Putin and United Russia. Prosecutors have established a decline in the chances that VTsIOM and “Levada” will [continue to] exist.

In another popular post (which now enjoys 20 retweets), oppositionist Alexander Zalessky made light of the fact that Levada’s main competitors, VTsIOM and FOM, are notorious for close ties to the Kremlin:

ВЦИОМ сообщает, что после закрытия Левада-центра рейтинги Единой России за неделю выросли на 35%.

VTsIOM reports that United Russia’s [approval] rating has grown 35% in the week since the Levada Center’s closure.

Not everyone, however, has rallied to Levada’s defense. The predictably pro-Kremlin e-zine politonline.ru posted excerpts of Gudkov’s public statement, tacking on the following question [ru]:

Стоп. Директор “Левада-центра” говорит, что иностранные гранты составляют лишь жалкие крохи – от 1.5% до 3% бюджета социологической службы. Но если это такие маленькие средства – почему же “Левада-центр” не готов от них отказаться и работать дальше без статуса “иностранного агента”? Вместо этого Лев Гудков говорит о “закрытии” центра. Вам тоже кажется, что это нелогично или где-то здесь нестыковка?

Stop. The director of the Levada Center says that foreign grants amount to just a few bread crumbs—from 1.5% to 3%—of the sociological institute’s budget. But if these funds are so small, why isn’t the Levada Center ready to reject them and continue its work without the “foreign agent” status? Instead of this, Lev Gudkov is talking about the “closure” of the center. Readers, does this also seem to you a bit illogical or somehow a bit off?

Stanislav Apetian, another RuNet presence commonly associated with the anti-opposition camp, raised the same questions on Twitter, writing:

Если в доходах “Левада-центра” иностранные деньги составляют 1,5%, то почему нельзя просто от них отказаться? К чему вопли о закрытии?

If in the Levada Center’s income, foreign money is just 1.5%, then why can’t it just reject such funding? What’s the use of bawling about getting closed down?

As most of Russia’s educated, Internet-conscious citizens share their disgust about the crackdown on Levada, the organization could do more to tackle questions like Apetian’s. Is Levada’s defense that it stopped receiving foreign donations after 2012, as its Twitter account indicated in a tweet [ru] earlier today? If that’s the case, why does the prosecutors’ warning mention OSI funding into mid-January 2013, and market research for foreign clients also into 2013?

Most important in the long-run, however, is the likely chilling effect that today’s news will have on Levada’s ability to maintain both clients (and donors) and key groups of respondents for its survey research. Indeed, in an interview [ru] with Kommersant Radio today, Gudkov revealed that clients and respondents alike are already increasingly reluctant to cooperate with an organization that carries Levada’s political baggage.

Moscow Soccer Fans Clash with Police

Kevin Rothrock — Sun, 19 May 2013 16:49:30 +0000

Following Saturday's scoreless soccer game that catapulted Moscow's CSKA club to its fourth Russian Premier League title, the team's fans clashed with riot troops in downtown Moscow. Police detained 140 people [ru], later releasing all but two. Bloggers posted photos to LiveJournal here, here, and here [ru], alleging police brutality.

Police “detain” a soccer fan, Moscow, 18 May 2013, photo by Sergey Danilov, posted to his LJ.

Dirty Words Russian Girls Can’t Say on the Internet

Kevin Rothrock — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:40:22 +0000

Fellatio has long been part of the rich tapestry of politics worldwide. For anyone alive and cognizant during the 1990s, Bill Clinton’s licentious escapades with Monica Lewinsky will forever color (or taint, depending on your perspective) the image of the American White House. Earlier this week, on May 13, 2013, opposition figure Maria Baronova penned an open letter [ru] to writer and political dissident Eduard Limonov, wherein she dropped a sexual bombshell of her own. Her text unabashedly refers to “masturbating in the shower” and credits Limonov—whose works [ru] are famous for their intricate descriptions of lewd sex acts—with teaching her (through his books) how to “suck dick” “without false modesty” and “fuck like an animal.” Baronova’s letter included a great deal more than these offhand sexual remarks, though it is those remarks that undoubtedly explain the online backlash that followed.

Sexism, locked and loaded

This week has been unusually cruel to women on Russian Twitter. In addition to the wave of sexist jokes that washed up after the RuNet learned about film star Angelina Jolie’s preventative double mastectomy, many Russian netizens took Baronova’s sexual revelations as an invitation to attack her specifically and female public figures more broadly.

Some of the insults came from the usual suspects, like tabloid editor Ashot Gabrelyanov, who proposed [ru] on Twitter that Jolie auction off for charity her removed breasts on eBay. Also joining the fun, however, was one of Pussy Riot’s lawyers—the infamously unpleasant Mark Feygin—who mused in a (now deleted) tweet:

Кстати сказать, насчет сисек Джоли, может это она операцию по изменению пола прикрывает. Трансгендеры отрезают. А чо?

By the way, regarding Jolie’s tits, maybe she’s using this to cover up a sex change operation. Transgenders slice off. Hey now.

Indeed, Feygin was on a roll. Commenting on Baronova’s open letter just a day before, he wrote in a tweet (that he has not deleted):

По поводу одного широко обсуждаемого сейчас текста, маленькая ремарка: …и это, пожалуй, всё, чему она научилась…

Regarding a certain now widely discussed text, [I have] one tiny remark: … this [fellatio], if you will, is the only thing she learned…

Lev Sharansky (a satirist personality run anonymously) quipped with open-ended sexism:

Вчера Баронова, сегодня Джоли. С ужасом жду завтра.

Yesterday Baronova, today Jolie. I await tomorrow with horror.

Others decided to broaden their aim and take shots at different prominent Russian women. Anna Veduta, opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s press secretary, found herself in Twitter user berdnikov’s crosshairs:

Анна Ведута более воспитанная девушка, чем Мария Баронова, поэтому она не расскажет нам чему она научилась у Алексея Навального

Anna Veduta is a better-raised young woman than Maria Barnova, therefore she doesn’t tell us what she’s learned from Alexey Navalny.

One of the many demotivators that appeared, following Baronova's open letter.

Demotivators soon popped up online, such as an image [ru] featuring Limonov above the text: “He taught Maria Baronova to suck dick. And what have you done today?” Another popular mash-up (see image to the right), which Baronova herself retweeted, included a photo of her riding a scooter below another picture of a blonde woman sitting in an expensive convertible. The caption is the Karl Marx quote: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” (The joke is that Baronova’s “ability” only earned her a scooter, rather than a sports car.)

Bringing in Baronova’s one-time boss, Duma Deputy Ilya Ponomarev (who himself retweeted [ru], rather strangely, Baronova’s line about masturbating in the shower), Twitter user fuckdaoutlaw asked:

Почему Пономарев Илья не научил свою помощницу Баронову сосать х%й?

Why didn’t Ilya Ponomarev teach his assisant Baronova to suck d**k?

Twitter user rusrusdada expanded the attack on Baronova into a jibe at the entire protest movement, writing:

На самом деле, Баронова из всей Болотной тусовки вызывает уважение. Она единственная честно призналась, что сосет. Другие тоже, но скрывают

In truth, Baronova, apart from the whole Bolotnaya [oppositionist] clique, deserves respect. She alone has honestly confessed that she sucks. The others suck, too, but they conceal it.

The LJ cesspool

On LiveJournal, where an absence of character limits accompanies the bravery of online anonymity, commentary was more substantive, but no less harsh.

A May 14 post [ru] by music critic Artem Rondarev functioned as a sort of beacon for Baronova’s critics, many of whom argued vociferously that politics is no place for raunchy women. In the comments to his post, Rondarev explained [ru] his position on Baronova’s lack of sexual modesty in her public prose, interpreting her lewdness as an endorsement of anarchy:

[…] в случае с Машей я всего лишь попытался объяснить ту простую мысль, что нельзя жить в обществе и быть свободным от него. Оно может не нравиться и все такоэ, но дилемма простая – или в обществе с конвенциями, или в Сомали. Потому что, видите ли, завтра у вас над головой сосед ночью врубит рэп на полную катушку, а когда вы ему придете предъявлять, скажет, что это его способ самовыражения, а вы ханжа, которая спит по ночам, в то время как все свободные люди слушают рэп. Ну и?

[…] in the case of Masha, I just tried to explain the simple idea that it’s impossible to live in society and [simultaneously] be free from it. One might not like everything about it, but the dilemma is simple: it’s either society with its conventions, or you’re in Somalia. Because, you see, tomorrow you’ll have an upstairs neighbor blasting rap music all night long at top volume, and when you go up to confront him, he’ll say that this is his means of self-expression, and you’re just a prude who sleeps at night, while all the free people listen to rap. Well?

In another comment [ru] on Rondarev’s post, LiveJournal user pervert_tanuki called Baronova “a furious attention whore,” to which Rondarev responded [ru] less than charitably:

Опять-таки – я не ищу тут мотивацию Маши, она очевидно лежит неглубоко […] Понятно, что девушке хочется трахаться; меня интересует, грубо говоря, почему подобным девушкам все время хочется именно трахаться, а не книжки читать.

Again—I’m not searching for Masha’s motivation. She’s obviously shallow […] It’s understandable that a young woman wants to screw; I’m interested, to put it crudely, in why similar girls always want precisely to screw, and not to read books.

Several bloggers have concluded that Baronova’s vulgarity damages any chances she has at a career [ru] in politics. In separate posts on LiveJournal, user haeldar [ru] and Google+ user mc project [ru] proposed a scenario thirty years in the future, where Baronova is now a Duma deputy serving a post-Putin Russian democracy. According to the plot, the now stately Baronova proposes some piece of moralist legislation (for example, banning sex robots), only to remind the public that “Maria Baronova in her youth was not above getting fucked in every hole.”

Even Kirill Goncharov, leader of the youth wing of Russia’s oldest liberal political party, joked on Twitter:

Я так понимаю, сегодня Маша Баронова публично закончила заниматься политикой?

So, as I understand it, Masha Baronova today publicly ceased to be involved in politics?

Twitter user VRebyata also resonated the idea that Baronova’s bawdiness causes problems for women in government, writing:

Баронова всколыхнула твиттер. Теперь самым популярным вопросом к женщинам – политикам будет вопрос об их отношении к книгам Эдуарда Лимонова

Baronova stirred up Twitter. Now the most popular question to female politicians will be the question about their relationship to Eduard Limonov’s books

In one comment thread [ru] on LiveJournal, a group of netizens even thought it fair to compare Baronova’s talk of oral sex to Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s participation in a public orgy. They even connected Baronova and Tolokonnikova to Cicciolina, the famed pornstar and member of the Italian parliament in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Baronova’s guile?

Not everyone deplored Baronova for her letter to Limonov, however. Many bloggers seemed willing to accept that her use of vulgarity was a cunning, if shrewd, ploy to gain an audience. Indeed, Norway-based Facebook user Andrew Voronkov observed [ru]:

Если бы она про это не написала, то многие бы и не прочитали бы статью.

If she hadn’t written about it [fellatio], then many people would not have read the article.

Poland-based LJ user Andrei Karatkevich enumerated [ru] four justifications for Baronova’s scandalous word choice:

1. Содержимое текста отнюдь не сводится к сосанию хуя, хотя все цитируют именно эту фразу.
2. С другой стороны, девушка, очевидно, понимала, что цитировать будут именно это.
3. …как из романа “это я, Эдичка” чуть менее чем все помнят сцену сосания хуя негру… и ничего больше.
4. А научил-то он её вещи нужной и полезной…

1. The contents of the text cannot be reduced just to sucking dick, though everyone is quoting exactly that phrase.
2. On the other hand, the girl obviously understood that everyone would quote exactly that.
3. [Limonov’s] novel “It’s Me, Eddie” is remembered more than anything for the scene where he sucks the dick of a black man … and nothing more.
4. And he [Limonov] taught her things necessary and useful…

Even some of Baronova’s critics felt compelled to acknowledge her letter’s publicity success. In a long response [ru] published the day after Baronova’s text, Pavel Zherebin (a member of Limonov’s NatsBol movement) offered the following measured praise:

Статья эта станет знаменитой, ведь Мария применила нехитрый прием – эпатаж с отсылками к сугубо сексуальным вопросам. До сих пор политическая публицистика была свободна от подобных методов форсированного продвижения своих идей. Поэтому Марии можно только поаплодировать – она храбрый новатор, которая решилась не просто на то, чтобы наполнить свою статью до краев женской гендерностью, но и на то, чтобы эту гендерность выразить прямым текстом в самых искренних и волнующих выражениях.

This article will become famous because Maria used an ingenuous approach—a shocking tone that touches on extremely sexual issues. Until now, political journalism was free from promoting its ideas by such methods. Therefore, we can only applaud Maria—she’s a brave innovator who decided not just to fill her article to the edges with female genderness, but also to express that genderness in plain speak, in the most sincere and exciting expressions.

Maria Baronova, Moscow, 25 August 2012, photo by Anton Nossik, CC 2.0.

In a comment [ru] on Rondarev’s blog, Baronova herself confirmed that she consciously employed gender as a means to generate a larger dialogue (about both Limonov and women in contemporary Russian politics):

Цель письма – получить от общества реакцию и расшевелить его, это общество. По большей части реакционное и консервативное. Цель вполне достигнута. Тонны говна и хихиканий: “ПИПИИИСЬКА” – получены. Дальше люди обсуждают. Дисскусия возникла. Каждый, в итоге придет, к чему-то своему. И мне от того, что люди поймут что-то важное (и каждый глубоко свое), будет приятно. End of story

The purpose of the letter was to get a reaction from the public and rattle it up. This society is mostly reactionary and conservative. My goal has been reached entirely. I got tons of shit and chuckles: “WEEEENIE.” From there, [though], people discuss. A discussion arose. Eventually, everyone comes to something all their own, and for me it’s nice that people will realize something important (and something deeply their own). End of story.

Not everyone is a hater

Many bloggers, of course, refused to attack Baronova, and some rallied to her defense. Journalist Arina Kholina, for instance, credited her in a Facebook post [ru] with capturing the collective experience of a generation of Russian women:

Не знаю, зачем все ругают Машу Баронову. Она была честна. Книга Лимонова про Эдичку, правда, была одним из сексуальных переживаний подросткового возраста. Особенно после СССР. Маше хватило смелости написать об этом. Пусть немного коряво. Может, конечно, особенно взрослые или умные читали совсем о другом, но мне было лет 16 и я думала про секс. И да – в каком-то смысле она была учебником. Наверное, если бы Маша написала, что книга научила ее шить кружевные рубашки, все бы умилились. А она, вот бесстыдница, про минет.

I don’t know why everyone is ripping into Masha Baronova. She was being honest. Limonov’s book about Eddie, it’s true, was one of the sexual experiences of adolescence. Especially after the USSR. Masha had the courage the write about it. Okay, it turned out a little clumsy. Maybe, of course, particularly mature or intelligent people read about something entirely different, but when I was 16-years-old, I was thinking about sex. And, yes, in a sense, it was a sort of textbook. Probably, if Masha had written that the book taught her how to sew a lace shirt [another part of It’s Me, Eddie], everyone would just melt for her. But she, without shame, wrote about blowjobs.

Opposition activist Ilya Yashin tried to relocate the focus of RuNet mockery to government officials, tweeting:

Надеюсь, депутат Бурматов никогда не будет писать открытых писем Вячеславу Володину. Не хочу знать, чему он его научил.

I hope [Duma] Deputy Burmatov never writes an open letter to [First Deputy Chief of Putin’s Staff] Viacheslav Volodin. I don’t want to know what he [Volodin] taught him.

Vera Kichanova, one of the opposition’s youngest figures, tweeted innocently:

А меня Лимонов только матом ругаться научил.

Limonov only taught me to curse [in obscenities].

Russia after blowjobs

One day after publishing her open letter, Baronova granted an interview [ru] to Daria Yausheva of jourdom.ru, where she addressed the backlash to her explicit sexual language:

Как сегодня написал Евгений Фельдман: «Лимонов научил сосать х** Баронову, а Путин – всю страну». Опять же, мужчина может писать о сексе достаточно свободно, а для женщин в России это по-прежнему – полузапретная тема. Тем более, если ты вовлечена в политику, то должна все время соблюдать некие рамки в которых, на самом деле, уже давно никто не живет.

It’s like Evgeny Feldman wrote [ru] today: “Limonov taught Baronova to suck d**k, but Putin taught the whole country.” Once again, a man can write about sex quite freely, but for women in Russia it’s still a semi-prohibited topic. Especially if you’re involved in politics, [you, as a woman,] must at all times observe certain confines, within which, in fact, nobody has lived for a long time.

Baronova identifies a cultural contradiction that is hardly unique to Russia. Certainly, the perseverance of sexist “confines” plagues societies the world over, no matter how developed or humane the civilization. The Internet response to Baronova’s talk of sex, whether one reads her text as a raised fist to patriarchy or a frivolous attempt at self-promotion, reveals that prejudices against freewheeling women enjoy widespread popularity among Russian netizens. That said, Baronova’s own audacity over the last 18 months—and the prospect of decades more to follow—promises to keep Russia’s male chauvinists busy indeed.

Russia's State-Contracted Revolutionaries

Kevin Rothrock — Tue, 14 May 2013 01:40:31 +0000

When Vladislav Surkov left the government last week, it triggered an avalanche of speculation about what the loss of “the grey cardinal” means for Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev in particular and his “liberal” political clan in general. The ouster followed a public fracas with the federal Investigative Committee, which recently opened an embezzlement case against managers of the state-sponsored Skolkovo innovation center, which is widely considered Surkov’s brainchild.

At the center of the feds' probe [ru] is Duma Deputy and anti-Putin protest movement leader Ilya Ponomarev, who earned a surprising $750,000 [ru] for his outreach (see below) and planning work for Skolkovo between 2010 and 2012.

In the last two months, Ponomarev’s Skolkovo income has attracted growing national media attention, but the issue has been percolating [ru] on the RuNet since last year. On September 23, 2012 (in response to a scandal involving registration fees for elections to the Coordinating Council of the Russian Opposition), Ponomarev first addressed the large sum of money he earned from Skolkovo, writing [ru] on LiveJournal:

Про доходы. Моя декларация есть в открытом доступе. Я никогда не жаловался на доходы. За последний год я получил как депутат около 2 млн. рублей, и еще около 7 млн. получил как гонорары за поддержку инновационных проектов по линии Фонда Сколково.

About my income. My declaration is accessible to all. [See here for Ponomarev's 2006-2012 records.] I’ve never wanted for earnings. In the last year, I made 2 million rubles as a Duma deputy, and I earned another 7 million rubles ($225,000) in honoraria for supporting the Skolkovo Foundation’s various innovation projects.

Suspicious minds

Many bloggers reacted to these figures with suspicion. Vadim Skvortsov, for instance, highlighted Ponomarev’s apparently unique advisor position under Skolkovo President Viktor Vekselberg, writing [ru]:

Что-то мне подсказывает, что такие денежки идут частенько прямиком на финансирование антипутинских акций “болотной” либерально-анархической оппозиции.

Something tells me that such money goes directly toward financing the anti-Putin demonstrations of the “Bolotnaya” liberal-anarchist opposition.

Earlier that year in March, a Lithuania-based blogger named skolkovo_eu also raised the idea [ru] that Vekselberg was financing the opposition through Skolkovo, linking to an article [ru] in the online tabloid wek.ru titled “Viktor Vekselberg Funds Ponomarev’s ‘Million Man March’?”

An artist's impression of Ilya Ponomarev's radical politics. Remixed by author from Alberto Korda's iconic 1960 photo of Che Guevara.

On April 19, 2013, a day after police raided the offices of Skolkovo’s management, the Investigative Committee opened [ru] a criminal case against the fund’s senior vice president, Alexey Beltiukov, for embezzling money through Skolkovo’s contracts with Ponomarev. Over the next twenty-four hours, the story developed in several directions online, focusing mainly on (1) continued suspicions about Ponomarev’s large honoraria, and (2) a debate about whether or not Skolkovo serves as a funnel for state sponsorship of the opposition. Much of the controversy surrounding the high income is that almost half ($300,000) was compensation for just ten lectures, meaning that Ponomarev earned roughly $10,000 for each talk, some of which lasted less than twenty minutes. Investigators even allege [ru] that he may not have attended one of these presentations in Tomsk in October 2011 (though there is photographic evidence to the contrary, and Ponomarev did “check-in” from the event’s location, using Foursquare).

Ponomarev & friends fight back

On April 20, writing on LiveJournal, Ponomarev responded [ru] to investigators’ accusations, defending the size of his contracts and arguing that the state saved money by hiring him instead of outsourcing the labor to private firms. While his Skolkovo deal formally concerned a lecture series, Ponomarev insists that far more was included in the work:

Мероприятий было гораздо больше, но меня Фонд изначально предупредил, что надо отчитываться небольшим количеством из них, которые проходили в открытом режиме, и каждое из которых смогут подтвердить свидетели в ходе неминуемых проверок.

There were far more events, but the Foundation from the start warned me that we needed to give an account of [only] a small number—the ones open to the public, so witnesses could confirm each of these events during inevitable [future] audits.

On April 19, another Duma deputy on LiveJournal, LDPR’s Igor Lebedev, posted scans [ru] supposedly containing excerpts of Ponomarev’s Skolkovo contracts. (Ponomarev says the scans are fake.) What Lebedev published accounts for about 80% of the $750,000 work, which Ponomarev allegedly described in a March 2011 letter to Beltiukov as “scientific research.” On the subject of qualifications, questions remain about Ponomarev’s academic credentials, given that he had not completed his higher education at the time of the contracted work. (He returned for a degree in 2011, after a 14-year hiatus.)

Because of Skolkovo’s mysterious recordkeeping, the public is free either to take on faith or reject Ponomarev’s claim that his work for the government was honest. Skolkovo’s puzzling approach to contracted labor seems to have stemmed from fears that a more straightforward, transparent approach would make it vulnerable to state inspectors. Ironically, it’s the absence of a clear paper trail that now incriminates the project.

Some bloggers have tried to piece together the various input costs that Ponomarev would have incurred in his travels inside Russia and abroad (he visited a dozen foreign countries in connection with Skolkovo work). On April 20, 2013, California-based software engineer Yuri Panchul (a self-confessed admirer [ru] of Ponomarev) estimated the likely costs of the Skolkovo-related business trips throughout the United States, concluding [ru] that any Silicon Valley executive would not have taken the contract for less than $1 million. Regarding probable travel and hospitality expenses (which Ponomarev claims to have paid using his honoraria), Panchul argues that costs were as high as $700,000, meaning that Ponomarev’s real salary was only about $50,000.

Clan warfare then & now

Others on the RuNet have been less inclined to believe that Ponomarev’s income was all lost to unreported expenses. On April 22, 2013, Kremlin-sympathetic blogger Nikolai Starikov tried to connect Ponomarev’s Skolkovo work to foreign political interference [ru], implying a plot [ru] between Westerners and certain government insiders:

Нас еще ждут отставки и весьма интересные повороты сюжета. Ведь наша «оппозиция», а вернее говоря, их западные друзья и кураторы были уверены, что им удастся не допустить прихода Путина на пост президента. А, значит, все эти «шалости» останутся покрытыми тайной и туманом. И тот факт, что государственные структуры оплатят протесты против государства, так никто и не узнает.

Но вот эту правду про истинное назначение денег Илья Пономарев никогда не скажет. И предпочтет выглядеть банальным жуликом и вором.

We can look forward to resignations and some quite interesting plot twists. Indeed, our “opposition”—or better said, our opposition’s Western friends and sponsors—were sure they’d succeed in stopping Putin’s return to the presidency. That means that all these “antics” will remain covered in secrets and mist. And nobody realizes the fact that state structures are paying for protests against the state.

But Ilya Ponomarev will never reveal this truth about the money’s real purpose. He’d rather look like a common thief.

In July 2010, when Russian politics was still caught in a feverish debate about whether Medvedev or Putin would run for president in 2012, LiveJournal user _iga taunted Ponomarev on his blog, arguing [ru] that the Skolkovo project amounted to a retirement plan for Medvedev, sealing his fate as a one-term president. Ponomarev disagreed, writing [ru]:

думаю, строго наоборот – этот проект является заявкой Медведева на второй срок

I think it’s exactly the opposite. This project [Skolkovo] is Medvedev’s bid for a second term.

Almost three years later, in the immediate aftermath of the Investigative Committee’s raids on Skolkovo, Ponomarev’s thoughts about the innovation center’s place in Russian politics have changed. Whereas Skolkovo was Medvedev’s executive calling card in July 2010, Ponomarev now sees politics as an intrusion on the project:

Я не склонен оценивать происходящее как борьбу Путина с Медведевым. Но думаю, мы являемся свидетелями борьбы консервативного клана (условного кооператива Озеро) с условными либералами в правительстве. Мне не нравятся они оба. Но второй клан хотя бы что-то делает, чтобы разорвать зависимость России от нефти и газа. Первый клан устраивает статус кво, и он сознательно рушит все начинания, которые могут его поколебать.

I’m not inclined to see events as a battle between Putin and Medvedev, but I do think that we’re witnessing a battle between the conservative clan (your Ozero co-op) and your various liberals in the government. I don’t like either of them, but the second clan is at least doing something to break Russia’s dependence on oil and gas. The former clan is satisfied with the status quo, and it consciously destroys all endeavors that might shake it.

Police Raid Navalny's HQ in Kirov

Kevin Rothrock — Wed, 08 May 2013 23:52:53 +0000

At this very moment, Kirov police are searching [ru] Alexey Navalny's local headquarters, established to coordinate the blogger's public outreach in the city where he currently stands trial for embezzling roughly half a million dollars. The case has attracted international attention as the latest in a long series of politicized Russian judicial proceedings, including the trials of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, three members of Pussy Riot, and others. (more…)

The Kremlin Defeated the Russian Opposition?

Kevin Rothrock — Thu, 02 May 2013 18:58:09 +0000

“Do you really have the feeling that the old system collapsed after the December 2011 protests? The system defeated the opposition. It’s a fact.” Vladislav Surkov delivered this line [ru] earlier today to a crowd of reporters and students at the London School of Economics. Surkov is the former First Deputy of the Chief of the Russian Presidential Administration, having worked in the Kremlin for over a decade, under both Putin and Medvedev, until his ouster in late December 2011. He is also widely credited with having masterminded the federal government’s “ideological policy” of engaging, but mostly suppressing, the protest opposition throughout the post-Yeltsin era.

The 2011-2012 winter protests that erupted in Moscow and other large cities owe much of their organizational success to the country’s increasingly active netizens, who reacted to Surkov’s statement today with the expected explosion of anger.

Vladislav Surkov, 25 September 2009, photo by Juerg Vollmer, CC 2.0.

Opposition activist Ilya Yashin tweeted [ru]:

“Система победила оппозицию”, сказал Сурков. Пока она, по-моему, победила только самого Суркова, которого в аппаратной борьбе сожрал Володин

“The system defeated the opposition,” Surkov says. Though it seems to me that it defeated only Surkov, who was gobbled up by Volodin in the fight for top dog.

Offering quick proof of Godwin’s Law, Twitter user Vagif Abilov wrote [ru]:

Сурков считает, что система победила оппозицию. А Гитлер победил евреев.

Surkov thinks that the system defeated the opposition. And Hitler defeated the Jews.

Albert Alkhazov, on the other hand, tweeted [ru] earnestly:

Сурков:”Cистема победила оппозицию” ? Cмешно :) Победить оопозицию можно только на честных выборах, которых вы боитесь.

Surkov: “the system defeated the opposition”? Hilarious ☺ You can only defeat the opposition in honest elections, which you fear.

Meanwhile on Facebook, the group “We Were at Bolotnaia Square and Will Come Again” posted [ru] a link to an article containing Surkov’s London remarks. Facebook users’ reactions to that post are universally hostile.

In a comment that attracted 30 “likes” (more than any other comment) and attacked another of Surkov's jabs at oppositionists’ “extremism,” Nikolai Kladovoi wrote [ru]:

Я думаю, слова Суркова следует трактовать по статье УК “Клевета”, и подать соответствующее заявление, от лица кого либо из участников “Болотных” событий. НИКТО из этих участников не был привлечён к ответственности по статье “Экстремизм” (282), и г-ну Суркову, конечно же известно об этом. Следовательно, данное заявление, 100% клеветническое.

I think that Surkov’s words ought to be addressed according to the criminal code against slander, and any one of Bolotnaia’s participants should file suit against him. NOT ONE of these participants has been convicted of violating the extremism statute, and Mr. Surkov is of course aware of this. And so Surkov’s announcement today is 100% slanderous.

In another popular comment, Victoria Koshkina wrote [ru] ironically:

это он в очень правильном месте сказал – Лондон должен знать, кому предоставляет визы

he said this in a very appropriate place—London should know whom it grants visas

Today in London, Surkov didn’t only taunt the protest movement. He also responded to questions about the Skolkovo Innovation Center, a high technology “science city” (still under construction) that’s meant to become Russia’s own Silicon Valley. Federal investigators have recently opened an embezzlement case [ru] against Duma deputy Ilya Ponomarev, who earned $750 thousand between February 2011 and February 2012.

Today, Surkov criticized investigators’ conduct in the case, saying [ru]:

На мой взгляд, так громко говорить о правонарушениях до решения суда, это может быть, и неправильно. Говорить нужно, но вопрос в громкости, можно говорить громко, а можно – не очень громко.

In my view, talking so loudly about legal offenses before a court decision might be inappropriate. We need to talk about it, but the question is about that conversation’s volume—we can talk loudly, but we can also talk not so loudly.

Ponomarev, incidentally, was a prominent figure in the winter protest movement. In an article [ru] for the website Slon.ru (written before Surkov’s London performance), political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky noted that Ponomarev’s scandal could harm Medvedev and anyone else associated with Skolkovo. Did Medvedev and Surkov funnel three-quarters of a million dollars to a man who played a central role in the massive anti-Putin protests of 2011-2012? Could this compromising link have influenced Surkov’s London declarations of victory over protesters? What’s he trying to prove? And who exactly was his intended audience?

Pavel Durov, Russia's Zuckerberg, Fights for Control of His Creation

Kevin Rothrock — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 05:22:01 +0000

Something strange is happening with Vkontakte, Russia’s homegrown version of Facebook. In the last couple of months, the company’s founder and current head, Pavel Durov, has suffered three very public “kicks in the teeth,” one of which might even lead to criminal charges.

The setup

First, on March 27, 2013, there was Novaya Gazeta’s Andrei Kolesnikov, who published [ru] hacked emails supposedly written by Durov and former Vkontakte Press Secretary Vladislav Tsyplukhin, addressed to Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s former chief ideologist. In those emails, Durov and Tsyplukhin indicate Vkontakte’s secret cooperation with federal police to suppress the online organizing efforts of the country’s political opposition in December 2011.

Pavel Durov of Vkontakte speaks during the Digital Life Design conference, 24 January 2012, photo by Hubert Burda Media, CC 2.0.

Second, on April 5, 2013, someone driving a white Mercedes registered to Vkontakte Vice President Ilya Perekopsky disobeyed a police officer [ru] on the streets of St. Petersburg, actually hitting the traffic cop with the front of the car, in a frustrated effort to change lanes. (See dashboard video footage here [ru].) When police pursued, the driver booked it on foot, escaping thanks to the efforts of his private bodyguard, who stayed behind to intervene and prevent a chase. About a week later, police identified Durov as the man behind the wheel. Within days, law enforcement officers descended on Vkontakte’s Petersburg office and Durov’s apartment (though he was present at neither). Shortly thereafter, Petersburg investigators called in Durov for questioning on April 19. When he didn’t show up, investigators called him in again on April 22. Again, the Vkontakte creator was a no-show.

Third, on April 21, 2013, Dozhd Television’s Leonid Parfenov announced [ru] that Durov had relocated to Buffalo, New York, where he is working through a new company called “Digital Fortress” on a new social network that will compete directly with Vkontakte, adding, “It’s clear that [Durov] has no intention of returning to Russia.” Parfenov’s bombshell came four days after a major shakeup [ru] in Vkontakte’s ownership, when investment group United Capital Partners bought up the shares cofounders of Lev Leviev and Viacheslav Mirilashvili (the original startup money behind Durov’s original vision), giving UCP 48% control of the company. UCP’s president, Ilya Shcherbovich [ru], is a man said to have strong ties to the Kremlin, given his seats on the boards of directors at state-owned industrial giants Rosneft and Transneft. In the April 21 television broadcast, Parfenov interviews Shcherbovich and airs a statement from Leviev and Mirilashvili, all of whom deny any hostile intentions against Durov. (Indeed, Shcherbovich says UCP wants to see Durov remain Vkontakte’s head.) After the show, Durov immediately denied [ru] Parfenov’s emigration insinuation and clarified that Digital Fortress is working on a cloud-storage side project that does not compete with Vkontakte.

Russia’s mighty independent media

Reading Westerners’ descriptions of the Russian media is an experience much like looking up the word “bad” in a thesaurus. Critics frequently except from their denunciations certain “respected” newspapers that focus on business, like Kommersant and Vedomosti. Novaya Gazeta is another publication that often gets a pass, thanks largely to its investigative journalists, many of whom have exhibited great bravery over the paper’s twenty-year history. Past Novaya reporters like Anna Politkovskaya (assassinated in 2006) are key to its reputation today as a newspaper many consider to be beyond reproach. In other words, when Novaya Gazeta publishes leaked emails implicating Pavel Durov and Vkontakte in secret cooperation with the Kremlin, it carries the force of Politkovskaya’s ghost and two decades of “speaking truth to power.”

Not everyone sees it that way, however. Anton Nosik, one of the most influential and established figures on the Russian Internet, wrote [ru] on LiveJournal on March 28 that Novaya’s exposé was a lie—an example of mercenary journalism (“zakazukha”). In that post, Nosik cites a series of Novaya Gazeta articles published in 2002 that were in fact part of coordinated media campaigns [ru] by warring business interests.

Leonid Parfenov (with the aid of some CGI) reports that Pavel Durov isn't likely returning to Russia, 21 April 2013, screen capture from YouTube.

On April 5 (the same day as the white Mercedes incident), Novaya published a follow-up [ru] to its March 27 article, this time focusing on Kremlin-cooperation by Tsyplukhin and “The Twitter Journal,” a Web project [ru] that received its $25 thousand startup funding from “Start Fellows”—a grant program administered by Durov and investor Yuri Milner. (Later that day, Tsyplukhin apologized [ru] and admitted that this second batch of leaked emails is genuine.) On April 6, firebrand radio host Yulia Latynina criticized [ru] Nosik’s March 28 comments, calling him a “friend” of Durov’s and highlighting that Nosik’s 2002 zakazukha example is eleven years old. On April 9, Nosik responded again, publishing a 2,500-word monster [ru] on his LiveJournal blog, addressing both Novaya’s more recent past and the details of its suspiciously anti-Durov reporting.

Nosik dissects Novaya

“If this had been any other newspaper,” Nosik writes, “a leak like this coming from a journalist would have been fact-checked by colleagues with some [technical] expertise.” Indeed, Novaya’s March 27 article says nothing about how Kolesnikov obtained the hacked emails, and the paper offers no way to verify their authenticity. Strangely, Novaya presents this sensitive content as image files [ru] containing print-view text, without any DKIM-signature. (The April 5 follow-up leak, featuring emails written by Tsyplukhin but not Durov, did contain the messages’ digital signature data.)

And then there is Durov’s email itself, which begins rather ludicrously:

Как вы знаете, мы уже несколько лет сотрудничаем с ФСБ и отделом «К» МВД, оперативно выдавая информацию о тысячах пользователей нашей сети в виде IP-адресов, номеров мобильных телефонов и другой информации, необходимой для их идентификации.

As you know, we’ve already been working for a few years with the FSB and the MVD’s special division “K,” promptly supplying information about thousands of our network’s users in the form of IP addresses, mobile phone numbers, and other information necessary to identify them.

If Durov—often described as a genius, not unlike Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg—had indeed collaborated with the Kremlin, would he really have announced it so plainly in a letter to Vladislav Surkov? Remarking on this curiosity, Maria Sergeyeva joked [ru] on Facebook that “only the lobotomized” write phrases like “we’re working with the FSB” in official documents. (Sergeyeva also mentions that Surkov is famous for refusing any letters longer than a single sheet of A4 paper, whereas the note allegedly authored by Durov runs a whopping four pages.)

Nosik also takes issue with Novaya’s peculiar presentation. For instance, its April 5 article features 18 emails written by Tsyplukhin about “The Twitter Journal,” but the headline instead takes aim at Durov’s company (“Micro-gods [a play on “microblog” in Russian] Are Vkontakte [In Contact] with Staraya Square [the Presidential Admistration]”), as though Tsyplukhin was scheming on Durov’s behalf. Novaya’s tenuous implication (by pun no less) seems to be that the Start Fellows program incriminates Vkontakte in Tsyplukhin’s dirty dealings with the Kremlin.

Nosik concludes his post with a scathing attack on Novaya Gazeta as a relic of Russian journalism from the 1990s, speculating that certain powerful people have decided at last to poison the country’s burgeoning Internet culture:

А сейчас какие-то люди, для которых ведение чёрных PR-войн является привычным занятием, решили влезть с этой дубиной в Интернет. И мне не очень важно, кто эти негодяи: володинские они, сурковские, малофеевские, или чьи-то ещё. Мне в любом случае не хочется, чтобы они тащили это своё говно в Рунет. Мне хватает Единого реестра и уголовных дел против блоггеров.

But now certain people, for whom running black publicity wars is an ordinary job, have decided to butt in on the Internet with this bludgeon. And it doesn’t matter to me who these scumbags are: Volodin’s people, Surkov’s, Molofeev’s, or someone else’s. Whoever they are, I don’t want them dragging their shit onto the RuNet. I’ve had enough of Internet Blacklists and criminal cases against bloggers.

Not a straightforward conspiracy?

On April 19, after learning that UCP now owns almost half of Vkontakte, Nosik again addressed the scandals surrounding the company, announcing somewhat unexpectedly [ru] that he doesn’t think the shareholders shakeup (which is rumored to have cost UCP roughly $700 million) is the reason for the media campaign against Durov. (Though, Nosik does harbor certain suspicions about UCP’s self-reported $3.5 billion under management, asking distrustfully whose money it is, if none of the investment fund’s five founding partners is worth even a fraction of that.)

Nosik points out that Durov’s partners, Leviev and Mirilashvili, made no secret about their long-held desire to cash out and disinvest from Vkontakte. Indeed, this tension features prominently in Nikolai Kononov’s 2012 book [ru], “Durov’s Code: the Real Story of the Social Network ‘Vkontkate’ and Its Creator.”

Just days later, on April 22, Kononov himself weighed in on Durov’s current crisis, offering five potential conclusions [ru] to the story. In the most probable scenario (which Kononov amusingly assigns a “95% likelihood”), Vkontakte’s majority shareholders sue Durov over his Digital Fortress project (which turns out to be a sleek instant messenger app), and Durov must sell off his remaining Vkontakte shares at a depreciated price to pay the legal damages.

Durov’s enigma

Throughout his tenure at Vkontakte, Pavel Durov has not shied from controversy. In July 2011, after billionaire Alisher Usmanov’s Mail.ru Group expanded its Vkontakte ownership to 39.99%, Durov fought bitterly to maintain control of the company, refusing to acquiesce to Usmanov’s stated desire to buy out Leviev and Mirilashvili. On July 22, Durov posted [ru] to Instagram a photo [ru] of himself gesturing obscenely at the camera, captioned, “[My] official response to the trash-holding [fund] Mail.ru regarding its latest attempt in vain to swallow Vkontakte.” Shockingly, Usmanov backed down [ru], apparently impressed by Durov’s gall (or perhaps instructed by the Kremlin to lay off). In April 2012, Mail.ru Group granted Durov full stewardship of its shares [ru], giving him majority control of Vkontakte, dependent of course on Usmanov’s continued good graces.

Durov's message to the FSB, 8 December 2011. Photo posted to Durov's Twitter account.

In early December 2011 (at precisely the time that Novaya’s article would have us believe he was writing love notes to Surkov), Durov tangled with St. Petersburg’s FSB, which had requested that Vkontatke delete seven groups on its network that were directed at organizing Russians against United Russia at the height of the Winter Protest Movement. Repeating his stunt against Mail.ru Group, Durov went public with the FSB’s request, posting a scan [ru] of the official police petition, along with a humorous image [ru] of a dog wearing a hoodie (reminiscent of Durov’s trademark cartoon dog).

Rather than ban oppositionist groups, Vkontakte actually lifted network restrictions [ru] on its groups, allowing them to host more than the 16,384-posts-per-day limit. Later that night, government investigators and camouflaged police special forces came knocking on his door, demanding entry to his apartment. Durov didn’t let them in, and the authorities left and never returned. (Durov’s bodyguards later told Nikolai Kononov that they nearly opened fire on the police, fearing they might attempt to breach the door by force.)

Days after this incident, Durov penned an open letter [ru] explaining his defiance as an act of business savvy, arguing that the FSB had tried to handicap Vkontakte in an area that foreign social networks operate freely. Clearly uncomfortable with his newfound status as a hero of the protest movement, Durov tried to reclaim his identity as a more ambiguous, business-focused figure:

Те, кто бросились благодарить нас за содействие политическим протестантам, теряют из вида простое обстоятельство. Если бы в те же дни мы стали проигрывать в конкурентной борьбе из-за отсутствия какого-нибудь сервиса виртуальных массовых репрессий, нам бы пришлось ввести и его. И будьте уверены – наши репрессии были бы самыми массовыми и самыми кровавыми на рынке.

Those who rushed at the chance to thank us for aiding the political protesters are losing sight of a simple fact. If in that same period, we’d started to lose our competitive edge because of a lack of some kind of virtual mass repression service, then we’d have introduced one of those, too. And rest assured, our repressions would be the most massive and most bloody on the market.

In yet another stockholders scandal, Durov revealed [ru] in November 2012 that Konstantin Malofeev [ru] (then head of Marshall Capital Partners and a trustee at the League for a Safe Internet) had ordered media attacks on Vkontakte in August earlier that year, exploiting his position at the League to accuse Vkontakte of hosting large amounts of child pornography. Malofeev, it seems, tried and failed as Usmanov had a year before to buy out Leviev and Mirilashvili. Durov says that the media campaign against Vkontakte stopped on a dime the moment that he approached Malofeev for negotiations, and restarted the moment those talks broke down.

Today’s mystery

Western coverage of Durov’s current predicament largely assumes that forces loyal to the Kremlin have swooped down on Vkontakte to claim the country’s biggest social network for federal police, who have clearly demonstrated their interest in controlling the website’s capacity to mobilize opposition sentiments. Miriam Elder of the Guardian writes that recent events have occurred “amid fears the Kremlin is looking to tighten its grip on the Internet,” adding that “Kremlin fears over the Internet have grown since Vladimir Putin returned to the Kremlin last year amid an unprecedented wave of protests.”

Nevertheless, almost half [ru] of Vkontakte has belonged to Mail.ru Group for nearly two years already, and Usmanov’s ownership has been above 30% [ru] since 2010. In all those years, Durov’s reign over the company, however colorful and rebellious, has depended entirely on the support of Russia’s richest oligarch [ru]. That being the case, what does the Kremlin gain from engineering “black PR” attacks on Durov? How does defaming Vkontakte for FSB collaboration “tighten the Kremlin’s grip on the Internet”?

It’s a tired trope in Russian politics to draw stark generational lines when discussing the country’s development. Alexey Navalny did it when he finished two-weeks imprisonment in December 2011 and declared that he’d entered jail in one country and emerged in another. Anton Nosik does it when he labels Novaya Gazeta an antique of the 1990s, and nods to the great mass of the Internet as a media culture reborn. Current attitudes about Pavel Durov and Vkontakte aren’t so different. People want to believe that “the Russian Facebook” and the promise of the Internet represent something new that can bring about a break with the past.

Remember, however, that Dozhd TV—the opposition’s foothold in televised media—was also a willing participant in (or at least enough of a sap to join) the PR campaign against Durov. Moreover, many netizens were ready to believe Novaya’s anti-Durov publications, despite the supposed outmodedness of 1990s journalism in today’s Internet age. Oleg Kashin, for instance, theorized [ru] on April 5 that a staff member working for Surkov’s replacement had spotted the incriminating emails in a random archival sweep and sent them over to Novaya Gazeta for his own entertainment.

Whoever is behind the media campaign and whatever its significance to Russian society, Durov’s legal strategy regarding the traffic incident in St. Petersburg seems to mirror his approach in December 2011, when police first came banging on his doors: he’s simply not answering. According to the Kremlin-friendly daily Izvestia, Durov’s plan could actually pay off. That newspaper published an article [ru] last week on April 26, indicating that Petersburg investigators might close the case on the white Mercedes, if they’re unable to reach Durov by early June. Is this casual speculation, or could it be a message to Durov to stay away? Will he?